08/30/2024
Next in the Lovettsville Historical Society's 2024 Lecture Series:
“Virginia & Slavery:
It’s More Complicated than You Think”
Presented by Nancy Spannaus
Sunday, September 8, at 2:00 p.m.
St. James United Church of Christ,
10 East Broad Way, Lovettsville VA
In her latest book Defeating Slavery: Hamilton’s American System Showed the Way, public historian Nancy Spannaus shows how the early abolitionist movement in the young American republic lost its battle, due to large part to the defeat of Alexander Hamilton’s program of industrialization. As the largest British colony, Virginia played a crucial role in every part of this process.
Chattel slavery got off to a slow start in Virginia, but by the 1770s it was already showing itself to be an economic, as well as moral, disaster. At that time, leading Virginians began to urge action to curb the practice, with writings and actions that reverberated throughout the colonies. These were to meet British royal resistance. The movement toward abolition grew in Virginia, as in other states, after the Revolutionary war, but was defeated.
The rise to power of the anti-industrial Jeffersonians in the 19th century set the course for Virginia to play its most destructive role—the sabotage of the Hamiltonian program of the 1820s. Despite the opposition of many leading Virginians (Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall is a case in point), as well as many western Virginians, the Richmond slavocracy joined with New York City financial interests to back Andrew Jackson’s campaign to kill the drive for industrialization. The success of that campaign set the stage for civil war.
